U.S. seeks review of fingerprint techniques

Four years after scuttling a study into the reliability of fingerprinting, the research arm of the Justice Department is seeking answers to fundamental questions about the grandfather of forensic science.

The National Institute of Justice recently called for researchers to explore such crucial issues as how to measure the quality of fingerprints lifted from crime scenes and the accuracy of comparisons made by law-enforcement examiners.

The research solicitation seeks to "provide juries with increased information about the significance and weight of fingerprint evidence" and also to create tools "to improve the fingerprint examination process," said Catherine Sanders, spokeswoman for the Office of Justice Programs, which includes the institute.

The agency's decision is the latest example of an unmistakable shift in the previously defiant world of fingerprint experts. Until recently, they had pointed to nearly a century of convictions in U.S. courts to dismiss calls for a closer examination of their discipline.

The institute's solicitation is "very significant because it's recognizing that there is an area that needs to have research done, and they're willing to step up to the plate and fund it," said Ronald Singer, president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

"What I think NIJ is hoping is that they can fund the research that will validate the process and answer a lot of the questions that have come up over the last couple of years."

Across the nation, law-enforcement and forensic officials are beginning to acknowledge the need to show whether science supports the expert witnesses whose opinions have long been accepted as gospel in American courts.

The broader reassessment of fingerprint comparison is largely being driven by a series of high-profile errors committed by examiners, including their role in the wrongful conviction of Stephan Cowans, a Boston man imprisoned for six years after a false match linked him to the shooting of a police sergeant.

A few months after Cowans' release last year, an even more embarrassing mistake occurred when the fingerprint world's elite--examiners at the FBI lab--falsely connected Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, to the 2004 train bombings in Madrid through a print found near the scene.

Justice on a tightrope

For several years, the National Institute of Justice has sought to walk a fine line over fingerprint comparisons, seeking to bolster the scientific foundation of a time-honored discipline without admitting it has weaknesses.

Calling for research gives ammunition to defense attorneys who can suggest that the need for such a study shows that the discipline is not entirely reliable.

Robert Epstein, a defense attorney in Philadelphia, did that several years ago when his client was charged in a robbery. In one of the only cases in which a judge has told prosecutors to prove the scientific validity of fingerprint comparison, the FBI asked crime labs across the country to help the bureau convince the judge, in part by examining fingerprint evidence from the case.

While most examiners agreed with the FBI's conclusion that the defendant's prints matched those found on the getaway car, 17 examiners in nine states were unable to make an identification, underscoring that the discipline is much more subjective than many fingerprint experts have acknowledged.

After receiving the conflicting responses, one of the FBI's top fingerprint experts asked the dissenting examiners to take another look, with the help of some FBI enlargements of the prints in question.

`Test your prior conclusions'

"These enlargements are contained within a clear plastic sleeve that is marked with red dots depicting specific fingerprint characteristics," wrote Stephen Meagher, chief of the FBI lab's latent print unit, in a June 1999 letter. "Please test your prior conclusions against these enlarged photographs with the marked characteristics."

Three months after Meagher's letter, the National Institute of Justice approved a call for research into fingerprinting, only to eventually let it die amid uproar from police and prosecutors.

Contacted last week, the FBI declined to elaborate on the letters, saying they were part of the public record.

But continuing questions about the reliability of fingerprint comparison and the experts who practice it helped spur the new request for research and prompted crime labs to re-evaluate how they do their work.

The FBI, for instance, has long left it up to individual examiners to determine whether they have enough points of comparison--among the loops, whorls and arches that make a fingerprint--to identify a match.

The bureau is now considering imposing guidelines on them, including the hundreds of examiners who evaluate tens of thousands of prints a day at the FBI's fingerprint database headquarters in West Virginia.

"Probably within the next year, we're going to set our own standards, a minimum number of points needed to declare a match," said Charles Jones Jr., a fingerprint examiner instructor at the FBI's West Virginia facility.

Asked why the bureau was considering the change, Jones explained, "I guess the Mayfield case was an eye-opener for everybody."

Noting that the examiners at the FBI lab outside Washington, D.C., have "always been the cream of the crop," he added, "If those guys can make a mistake, so can we."

In Boston, Cowans' exoneration has forced the police department to shut its fingerprint unit and rebuild it.

Six years after authorities used a fingerprint match to implicate him in the shooting of a Boston police sergeant, DNA tests excluding Cowans forced them to recheck the print. The re-examination last year revealed that his print wasn't even close to a match of the one found at the crime scene.

Grand jury declines to indict

Six years into a 35- to 50-year prison sentence, Cowans was released from prison last winter.

The disclosure prompted prosecutors to seek perjury charges against Dennis LeBlanc, a veteran examiner with 18 years in the fingerprint unit who had falsely matched Cowans' print to a glass mug.

A state grand jury chose not to indict LeBlanc. But according to an outside consultant's report obtained by the Tribune, he "discovered his mistake" before he testified in Cowans' 1998 trial "and concealed it all the way through the trial."

A second report on the entire Boston fingerprint unit found that "excellence [was] not expected, therefore not achieved, " with supervisors failing to provide proper training for examiners.

The report also said that a "never ending stream" of work exceeded the "perceived abilities" of the unit's examiners, and that testing showed they made false identifications.

After receiving the second report last October, Boston police shut the fingerprint unit. Deciding the unit was fundamentally flawed, the department has gone "back to ground zero," in the words of Capt. Det. Thomas Dowd, who was named to reform the unit.

Dowd said the department wants to replace the sworn officers who had made up the six-person fingerprint group with civilian employees led by a respected forensic expert, whom Dowd still is trying to find.

`Blind' reviews to be standard

One of the improvements, he said, will be to ensure that examiners who review their colleagues' work do so without knowing the other's opinion. Such blind reviews could solve a recurring problem, like that of the Mayfield case.

Though LeBlanc's false comparison played a key role in convicting Cowans, LeBlanc's mistake wasn't the only flawed part of the prosecution. The sergeant who was injured, for instance, falsely identified Cowans as his assailant.

"The system failed me," LeBlanc said in a recent interview in his modest Boston-area home, contending he made an honest mistake. "And the system failed Cowans."

LeBlanc, 53, who is on paid administrative leave because of the case, reluctantly discussed his role in it, fearful his bosses would fire him.

Cowans, a petty thief and burglar, insisted on his innocence in the police shooting even as a judge sentenced him in 1998. In prison, Cowans sought to earn money for DNA testing by volunteering for "biohazard" duty, which paid him $3 a day to clean up blood and whatever else was left after prisoner fights and other violence.

DNA tests exclude convict

His attorneys, meanwhile, pushed for DNA testing on a hat found near the home where the police sergeant's attacker fled and saliva on the mug from which LeBlanc said he found the print match.

In the fall of 2003, a forensic lab said its tests showed that Cowans could not have been a contributor of the DNA.

Faced with the test results, prosecutors fell back on the fingerprint evidence as proof that Cowans committed the crime. But in January 2004, when the state rechecked the fingerprint on the mug, it determined the print didn't match Cowans'.

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